28 Years Later director Danny Boyle reveals unexpected 'nightmare' of filming NAKED zombie scenes for the horror movie starring Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Ralph Fiennes

Daily Mail​

7 hours ago

Director Danny Boyle has admitted that it was a 'nightmare' filming naked zombie scenes for the highly acclaimed movie 28 Years Later due to one challenge.
Danny, 68, stepped back into the director's chair to helm the 'terrifying' horror, written by Alex Garland, 23 years after the pair's first film, 28 Days Later, hit cinemas.
After the long-awaited film hit screens, Danny reflected on the challenges he faced while filming the movie, which stars Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Ralph Fiennes.
He revealed they needed to take extra care not to have 'naked' actors on the set because they had strict rules in place to protect the film's child star, Alfie Williams.
Danny told PEOPLE: 'I mean, if you're recently infected [with the zombie virus], you'd have some clothes, but if you've been infected for a long time, the clothes would just disintegrate with the way that you behave
'We never knew [about rules governing nudity on set when there's a child present] going in, it was a nightmare.'
In order to still film scenes featuring naked zombies while adhering to the safeguarding rules, Danny revealed the actors had to wear prosthetics.
'Interestingly, because there was a 12-year-old boy on set, you're not allowed for anybody to be naked, not really naked, so they look naked, but it's all prosthetics,' he shared.
'So it's like: ''Oh my God,'' so we had to make everybody prosthetic genitals.'
Danny said he was keen to push boundaries with the elements of nudity and gore in the film, and he's glad studio bosses were supportive of his plans.
He added to Variety: 'I think one of the wonderful things about horror is that you're expected to maximize the impact of your story. Everybody wants to do that with a drama, with the romance, whatever.
'But with horror, it's obviously gonna be brutal, some of it. What we loved was setting it against an innocence that's represented by the various children in it, and also the landscape, the beauty of the landscape, the nature.
'Having those two forces stretches your story as far as you can go, if you maximize them.'
The first-ever movie of the series, 28 Days Later, followed Jim (Cillian Murphy), who awakes from a coma to discover Britain has been plagued by a terrible pandemic known as the Rage Virus, which turns those affected into murderous zombies.
Although he didn't star in the second instalment and won't be in the new release, Cillian will make a brief appearance in the upcoming fourth instalment - 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple.
The fourth film features Danny once again as a producer while Nia DaCosta directed, and it has already been shot ahead of its planned January 2026 release.
However, the Trainspotting moviemaker hopes to be back in the directing chair once again if a fifth final movie is given the green light.
The series was created by Alex Garland, 55, who wrote the screenplays for all the films except for the second instalment, 28 Weeks Later.
Critics have already weighed in on the third zombie horror movie in the franchise, 28 Years Later, and it has received rave reviews.
Two decades on from the 2002 original, which saw a deadly virus plague London, the new movie finds a group of survivors living on the secluded island of Lindisfarne.
Rotten Tomatoes has handed the movie an impressive 94 per cent critic approval rating after rounding up the thoughts of more than 91 film reviewers.
The Daily Mail's Brian Viner was incredibly impressed after watching the series' latest gory instalment, dubbing the movie the 'best post-apocalyptic horror-thriller film I have ever watched'.
He wrote: 'With the terrifying and electrifying 28 Years Later, director Danny Boyle and writer Alex Garland have delivered the best post-apocalyptic survivalist horror-thriller film I have ever seen. Which sounds like limited praise, yet it's a much more crowded field than you might think.'
Robbie Collin in The Telegraph handed 28 Years Later a rave review, with the critic scoring the 'terrifying' horror movie five stars out of five.
'Garland employs a strain of peculiarly British pulp humour - very 2000 AD, very Warhammer 40,000 - to undercut the ambient dread,' he wrote.
'And flashes of Arthurian fantasias and wartime newsreel footage (as well as a pointed double cameo for the now-felled Sycamore Gap tree_ serve as regularly nudges in the ribs as he and Boyle ty with the notion of a 21st century British national myth.'
The film also received five stars from The Times critic Ed Potton, who hailed Jodie Comer's 'impressive as always' performance.
The journalist wrote: 'Is this the most beautiful zombie film of them all? It's hard to think of another that combines such wonder and outlandishness with the regulation flesh-rending, brain-munching and vicious disembowelment.'
The BBC 's Caryn James gave the highly-anticipated film four stars out of five as she dubbed Ralph Fiennes's performance 'scene-stealing'.
'28 Years Later is part zombie-apocalypse horror, part medieval world building, part sentimental family story and - most effectively - part Heart of Darkness in its journey towards a madman in the woods,' she wrote.
'It glows with Boyle's visual flair, Garland's ambitious screenplay and a towering performance from Ralph Fiennes, whose character enters halfway through the film and unexpectedly becomes its fraught sole'.
Empire also awarded 28 Years Later four stars out of five, with journalist Ben Travis writing: '28 Years Later is ferocious, fizzing with adrenaline. The mainland thrums with a pervasive sense of immediate danger; when the infected arrive (and, do they arrive), it is breathlessly tense.'
Reviews in The Guardian and The Independent were slightly more critical, however, with journalists scoring 28 Years Later with three stars.
Peter Bradshaw wrote in The Guardian: 'A little awkwardly, the film has to get us on to the mainland for some badass action sequences with real shooting weaponry - and then we have the two 'alpha' cameos that it would be unsporting to reveal, but which cause the film to shunt between deep sadness and a bizarre, implausible (though certainly startling) graphic-novel strangeness.'
While The Independent 's Clarisse Loughley wrote: 'Even if 28 Years Later feels like being repeatedly bonked on the head by the metaphor hammer, Boyle's still a largely compelling filmmaker, and the film separates itself from the first instalment by offering something distinctly more sentimental and mythic than before.'
28 Years Later has become the best horror ticket pre-seller of 2025, with the film expected to gross around $30million in its first weekend.
28 YEARS LATER: THE REVIEWS
The Daily Mail (FIVE STARS)
Rating:
With the terrifying and electrifying 28 Years Later, director Danny Boyle and writer Alex Garland have delivered the best post-apocalyptic horror-thrill I have ever seen.
The Times (FIVE STARS)
Rating:
Jodie Comer is impressive as always in the latest instalment of the post-apocalyptic series
The Telegraph (FIVE STARS)
Rating:
This transfixingly nasty zombie horror sequel, starring Jodie Comer and Ralph Fiennes, is Danny Boyle's best film in 15 years
The Evening Standard (FIVE STARS)
Rating:
Jodie Comer, young Alfie Williams and Ralph Fiennes have a monsters' ball in this supercharged third outing for the 28 Days Later series
BBC Culture (FOUR STARS)
Rating:
Alex Garland and Danny Boyle have reunited for a follow-up to their 2002 classic. It has visual flair, terrifying adversaries and scene-stealing performance from Ralph Fiennes.
Empire (FOUR STARS)
Rating:
The sequel we needed is both the film you expect, and the one you don't. There's blood, but also real guts and brain and heart - visceral cinema soaked in viscera.
The Guardian (THREE STARS)
Rating:
This tonally uncertain revival mixes folk horror and little-England satire as an island lad seeks help for his sick mum on the undead-infested mainland.
The Independent (THREE STARS)